What You Need to Know: The Cubs’ bats remained lively, continuing Friday night’s hitting barrage, and Jake Arrieta settled down after a rocky first to deliver the Cubs an impressive victory. Albert Almora and Addison Russell homered, and Jason Heyward added a bases-clearing triple to put the game out of reach in the middle innings. […]
Category: Articles
Zack’s Sack: A Wrigleyville Mailbag, Vol 7., ALL-STAR EDITION
Hey now, and welcome to the special All-Star edition of Zack’s Sack! The Cubs made a huge trade this week, and Wade Davis blew the All-Star game for the National League. So, don’t delay, act now—let’s dive into the sack. As always, Twitter replies have been left unedited to capture the immediate nature of the medium, […]
Game 89 Recap: Cubs 9, O’s 8
What You Need to Know: The Cubs are 1-0 in the Jose Quintana era. The trade has worked out well, I guess. The Baby Bears attacked early tonight, scoring eight runs on four home runs against O’s starter Kevin Gausman. Gausman whad the worst start of his career to date in terms of Tom Tango’s version […]
The White Whale Trade: The Search for a Young Cost Controlled Starter Ends
After a frustrating first half of the 2017 season, some people wondered whether or not the 2017 Cubs would be better off as sellers instead of buyers. Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer and Co. quickly put an end to that line of thinking yesterday by trading Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease, and two other minor league prospects to […]
A Different Kind of Angst: What Needs to Go Right on Offense
In January, during the Cubs Convention at the Sheraton Grand in Chicago, Joe Maddon titillated the crowd with his confident proclamation that the Cubs would repeat their World Series title, and no one in the crowd doubted it. In the months since, “That’s Cub” has become, again, both a pejorative and mocking refrain, depending on […]
After the Slow Start, Is Quintana Recovering?
This might already be a silly question because Jose Quintana may already have recovered from what was a really wonky start to the season. To wit, Quintana had a 1.09 WHIP and 3.21 FIP in his June starts.. You’ll take that for the rest of the season and feel pretty good about it. Still, that […]
Cubs Bolster Rotation, Land Quintana
José Quintana will still be in pinstripes, but he’ll be pitching his home games a few miles north as of this morning. In a blockbuster deal completed before the All-Star break even ended, the Cubs acquired the Colombian left-hander Quintana from the White Sox in exchange for top prospect Eloy Jiménez, top pitching prospect Dylan Cease, […]
Appreciation for Brian Duensing
Halfway through the season, it’s become apparent that we’re living in one of those alternate PECOTA-projected simulations where the Cubs are a .500 team, the Brewers are just good enough to hold on to first, the Diamondbacks and Rockies are legitimately good, and the Giants are having one of the worst seasons in their history. There […]
Juiced Baseballs Clouding the Joy in Elevated Home Run Rate
At this point, it’s accepted that there’s something up with the baseballs that are being used by Major League Baseball this season. We see home run totals on record paces, seemingly every pitcher’s HR/FB rate is up, and pitchers are basically telling us they’re throwing Slazengers and can’t get quite the feel they used to. And […]
A Reflection on the First Half
This All Star break feels like a reprieve. After three months of underperformance, disappointment, and frustration, there is genuine relief in this: four days where the Cubs will not be showing up to play baseball. In that respect, it’ll be just like every day following a win in the first half. Since none of us […]